Opening Friday, July 12th, from 7PM - 10PM

Tender Alchemists explores the arbitrary designations of value assigned to objects. The artists in Tender Alchemists undermine the false dichotomies of luxury and austerity, art and craft, and form and function. With a nod to the homemaking practices of pioneer America and Pakistan, Zehra Khan simulates traditional textiles with mass-produced materials such as permanent marker and hot glue. Joshua Kent creates formal compositions with discarded objects that reveal the bounty obscured by professed scarcity. Both artists are tender alchemists, although it might be wrong to say that their chrysopoetic gestures turn crude materials into gold. Their magic is contextual. By re-presenting marginalia as objects worthy of being beheld, they validate the quiet opulence of everyday experience.